Vladimir Putin Is Simply Trolling Us in the Open Now

Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic is essential reading on all things Putin and Russia, not least because she was born there and still speaks the language. So following her on the electric Twitter machine Friday morning was quite interesting. Vladimir Putin had helped Megyn Kelly kick off her new gig with NBC News by sitting for a very amusing interview in St. Petersburg in which he demonstrated his mastery of mock horror and blatant trolling. From Business Insider:

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Asked about the Paris Agreement on climate change that President Donald Trump withdrew the US from on Thursday, Putin replied, "Don't worry, be happy. "It's about preventing temperature changes of 2 degrees," Putin said, adding that those at the forum "somehow do not yet feel that the temperature is rising. By the way, we should be grateful to President Trump. In Moscow, it's raining and cold and even, they say, some snow. Now, we could blame this all on American imperialism, that it's all their fault, but we won't." Putin seemed to leave the door open to the US rejoining the agreement, which Trump has said is a possibility.

Good of President Vlad to leave that door open, don't you think? And hacking? What's that? Isn't your child a 400-pound kid from New Jersey?

"IP addresses can be invented. A child can do that!" Putin replied. "Your underage daughter could do that. That is not proof." He then compared US intelligence officials blaming Russia for the hacks to "anti-Semitism and blaming the Jews. This is disinformation." Putin said on Thursday that the Kremlin did not order the hacking campaign, but that "patriotically minded" Russian citizens may have taken it upon themselves to target "those who say bad things about Russia."

(By the way, if you think it's creepy that a former KGB director and vicious autocrat knows that Kelly has a six-year old daughter, much less refers to her in such a casual way, you're not alone.)

But Ioffe, thanks to her fluency in Russian, caught Putin in what she believes to be some serious signaling to his most prominent American fans.

In case it's not clear, he's talking about houses of ill repute. The second time in a year Putin is joking publicly about prostitution.